Boston dumps Flock; EFF audit finds officers searched cameras for 'LOL' and 'sexy'

Boston ended its Flock Safety license-plate-camera pilot this week after the city's annual surveillance report found the vendor shared Boston vehicle data with outside agencies in violation of contract terms. An Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis of officer search logs shows the "fix" Flock has been selling other nervous cities, a dropdown menu that asks officers to pick a reason for a search, does not check whether the reason matches the real purpose of the lookup. (Ars Technica)

Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed the city will not use Flock's platform, citing access controls that "can be unset or reset in ways that violate the city's privacy policy." (WBUR) Boston's annual surveillance report, released September 14, requires vendors to agree not to share license-plate-reader (ALPR) data with outside agencies and to erase recordings after 30 days unless police request retention for legal or investigative purposes. (Boston Globe) The pilot was governed by BPD Special Order SO-25-16, the underlying city policy document that set the contractual and operational terms for the test, including which BPD units could access the system and under what conditions. (BPD SO-25-16)

Flock's camera network was never the constrained system the vendor's marketing implied. The system is built so outside agencies can query Boston's camera data, and the access controls that limit that sharing are configurable in ways the vendor does not unilaterally lock down. Boston's pilot was supposed to enforce the city's privacy policy at the contract layer, and it did: by catching the violation, ending the pilot, and putting the finding on the public record rather than burying it in a non-renewal notice. (MassLive)

EFF's analysis of ALPR search logs found officers in jurisdictions using Flock's platform typing nonsense search reasons including "LOL," "LMAO," "sexy," and "idk" when querying sensitive location data. (Ars Technica) The older logs predate Flock's late-2025 dropdown change, but they are the only public record of how officers actually behave when nothing checks the answer. Flock introduced the dropdown so officers pick from a menu rather than type freeform. The new menu does not require the chosen reason to match the true purpose of the search, and Flock does not appear to audit the answers. A UI prompt without backend validation is a nudge, not a control, and the older freeform-text logs are the evidence that officers will type whatever is fastest when nothing checks the answer.

Flock has been pitching the dropdown change to other nervous cities as a meaningful privacy improvement. Boston's contract-violation finding, now on the public record, complicates that pitch. Ars Technica reported last month that cities have been dropping Flock at an accelerating pace over surveillance, data-sharing, cost, and abuse concerns. (Ars Technica) (GovTech) Boston is the highest-profile city to date to put a formal contract-violation finding on the record rather than a quiet non-renewal, which raises the bar for any city procurement officer signing a new Flock contract without tightening the data-sharing terms in writing.

Flock's counter, given to Ars, is that new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to 1 so far in 2026. That counts customer growth, not contract compliance. Boston's specific finding is that data was shared outside the city in violation of a contract Boston had on file.

Wu said Boston will keep using license-plate cameras under a publicly approved and authorized policy that guarantees privacy and civil-liberties protections, meaning the city is not stepping back from the technology. It is stepping back from this vendor. (WBUR) The watch item for other cities is whether Flock's dropdown-reason change gets a real backend check, or whether the contract language is the only constraint that ever bites, and whether future pilots ship with a public-access log so a future Boston does not have to take the vendor's word for how the data is being used.